This article was submitted to Amerikaner.org by AJ (of “The Smoke Pit”). If you would like to submit your own content to the website, please email editor@amerikaner.org
Editor’s Note: This article is about a knife fight. The video is included, and is not safe for work. Viewer discretion is advised.
This video reflects nothing new about combat. As Homer wrote:
“Achilles seized Lycaon by the hair and drove his sword into the hollow at the collarbone, slicing through the flesh and severing the tendons. Lycaon stretched out his hands in supplication, but Achilles showed no mercy, thrusting him aside to die in the dirt.”
The principles remain constant: strength, viciousness, endurance, and a relentless human will to fight, to live, and to kill. From frag battle drills to eye-gouging, pressing the attack while wounded, and repeatedly plunging the blade, this is war.
The carnage ends with an act of 12th-century seppuku applied in the modern age.
War is an extreme trial of moral and physical strength and stamina. Any view of the nature of war would hardly be accurate or complete without consideration of the effects of danger, fear, exhaustion, and privation on those who must do the fighting.
Human will, instilled through leadership, is the driving force of all action in war.
No degree of technological development or scientific calculation will diminish the human dimension in war. Any doctrine which attempts to reduce warfare to ratios of forces, weapons, and equipment neglects the impact of the human will on the conduct of war and is therefore inherently flawed.
Increasing the capacity and capability for violence is the chief end of every leader and self professed warrior of any kind.
Tolstoy wrote:
“All violence consists in some people forcing others, under threat of suffering or death, to do what they do not want to do.”
While I am tempted to add my own commentary here, I’ve made my positions on war and peace clear. No amount of Sassoon or Owens’s poetry or imagery of the dead floating along the shoreline at Tarawa will dissuade “some people” from “forcing others.”
The common man understands it’s all a racket and that we shouldn’t send anyone’s child to die in some foreign trench.
But when we do, we owe them every advantage possible.
We must be zealous in our commitment to violence in training, and commit ourselves to the highest standards, because there’s no room in the trenches for anything tender, delicate, or soft.
